Journey of A Yellow Man No. 11 Multi-Culturalism

This work is based on a performance by the artist Lee Wen during a conference on multiculturalism, held in Singapore in 1997. It is part of a larger series, Journey of a Yellow Man. The title refers to the artist’s Chinese ethnicity, and the work involves him painting himself yellow to emphasise this. In this performance, yellow-coloured Lee began with a monologue that criticised the Singapore Art ’97 exhibition, which he contended overrepresented ink and watercolour artists while omitting performance, installation and experimental artists. Lee raised a miscellany of issues, ranging from the sorts of regimes that construct what art is, to the media that secure art historical recognition. At the end of his lecture, the artist formed the letters C, M, I and O out of rice, representing ethnic clusters of Chinese, Malay, Indian and ‘Others’ in Singapore. Lee likened this rigid categorisation to the arts where only easily definable art forms are recognised, while alternative forms like performative art were yet to be established. He then obliterated the rice patterns, provoking a reconsideration of such categories and hierarchies. In steady conflations between ethnicity, the ethnic body, and the definition of artistic systems, the Yellow Man series is one of Lee’s most significant and highly historicised body of works and is an icon of the global performance art scene of the 1990s.